Replace Windows 7 with Ubuntu 11.10, keep Windows D: partition

Question

I have a laptop that came with Windows 7 with the drive divided into two partitions, and I have saved my own data on the D: partition.

I recently grew annoyed (after comparing with a Wubi installation) on how bad the Windows Synaptics touchpad driver works. All my other computers run (K)Ubuntu, so I thought, why not replace Windows with Ubuntu? I'm wondering, will the normal Ubuntu installer keep my other partition intact if I don't do anything special in the installer? If not, how should I configure it to nuke everything but the partition with personal data?

Thanks in advance.

P.S. The Wubi installation broke down, by sudo breaking completely. Not much to do there, so I un-installed it. No thanks.

Answer 1

During installation from the LiveCD or LiveUSB, the Ubuntu installer will detect your partitions. Instead of C: or D:, you'll see sda1, sda2, sdb, etc., but they are the same as what you see from Windows. Make sure you don't select "Use full drive" (or something similar), as Ubuntu will overwrite all of your partitions. Instead, click on Manual and do your partitioning from there.

Just make sure you know how the size of your C: and D: to be able to differenciate them from the installer, or you'll end up overwriting the wrong one.

Whatever you do, always back up beforehand.

Answer 2

It it easy! Boot your live cd, fire up the installation process and when you reach the step where you should choose a partition and edit the hard drive just remove the windows system partition (i suppose C:) and you will get free space. Use that free space to make a ext3,ext2,ex4 partition for linux / (root), but don't use the whole space (leave 3gb) and create swap space from the remaining 3gb. and thats it. I hope you can understand what I am aiming at. P.s I've done this a million times.